


Sparrow

by dataantidote



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Hiding, Hurt Jim, Insomnia, Jim is stressed but doesnt notice, Jim needs a hug, Memories, References to Depression, Sleep Deprivation, Song Lyrics, emotionally hurt, honestly Jim you should ask for help, references to his past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 17:58:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12393228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dataantidote/pseuds/dataantidote
Summary: "Why sparrow why, won't you tell me why I'm sadSing us both a melody, the best that you can"Jim has been feeling off for a while now and ignoring this feeling was getting harder and harder each day.





	Sparrow

"Why sparrow why, won't you tell me why I'm sad  
Sing us both a melody, the best that you can"

The melodious song of a sparrow woke Jim up every morning.  
And every morning he turned his alarm off, got up and started to get ready for his daily duties as a captain.  
Time after time he did the same morning routine, it had become so natural to him that his brain usually guided him through it easily. 

However this morning he stayed longer in bed than usual. There was a weight on his chest, something that had been happening to him more frequently in the last couple of months.  
Somehow it had become harder and harder for him to put up the energy to get out of bed.  
Something had been pulling him back into his sheets every time. It seemed as if someone had replaced his heart with lead.  
It had felt like this for quite some time now.

When he first noticed he had been confused.  
He only knew this feeling from days that had been extremely rough. Days that the crew faced a major fight or ones where he had been exposed to an extra level of stress.  
On those days it sometimes happened that when he fell asleep at night, seriously exhausted from everything that had happened, his chest seemed heavier than normal.  
Yet, when he woke up the next day the feeling had usually vanished.

Therefore he was perplexed when he woke up on a normal weekday and felt just the same.  
The day before had not been uncommonly stressful and otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  
From his experience with this feeling he had made the conclusion that he should just wait, get a good sleep that night and the feeling should be gone the next day.  
So he did his best to ignore the buzzing in his chest for the rest of the day however he woke up the next day feeling the same as before. 

Theoretical he had not been exposed to a lot of stress, only the normal amount he had to deal with every day.  
He never felt like that had been that much.  
Of course, everybody was constantly demanding something from him or asking him for a favour but that were just his duties as a captain and it was his job to function perfectly, always.  
Yesterday had been a usual day on board of the Enterprise, he had completed all his duties to their best, he laughed and talked with his friends and he went earlier to bed to make sure he would feel better the next day.  
Yet, it was all for nothing.  
Something was off.

He had never felt overwhelmed till now.  
Obviously, everybody wanted something from him, after all, he was the captain of the Enterprise and it was his duty to complete all the tasks he was given.  
Maybe it was not really his duty to listen to all the concerns of his crewmembers, to give them advice and to support them but he felt obliged to help everybody the best he could.  
He never even thought about putting himself first and the well-being of his crew second.  
To him, the happiness of the majority was more important than his own.  
He never thought that maybe his own mental health was getting more and more fragile the more he ignored his own needs and concerned himself with the problems of others. 

He had no time to think about those things anyway, most nights he was the last person on board to got to sleep and the first person in the morning to wake up and get ready for the day.  
At night he got into his personal quarters, after checking that the night patrol on the bridge had arrived, checked his calendar for the next day, changed into his pyjamas, went to the bathroom and fell asleep right after that.  
There was no time to think about anything really.  
All he wanted was to got to sleep and get some peace between work hours. 

It had started with the feeling that something was off. He felt a knot in this chest that he could not really explain to himself.  
Considering asking McCoy if he knew what it could be he made his way towards the med bay.  
Only that the knot seemed to get tighter and tighter the closer he got to it.  
It was unbelievable how hard it suddenly was for Jim to take a deep breath.  
It was almost impossible.  
While he brought up his hands to loosen his shirt collar a bit he noticed how much they were shaking.  
Up to this point, he had suspected nothing severe was causing his uncomfortableness but now he started seriously questioning what was wrong with him.

He went to one of the public bathrooms situated close to the med bay to calm himself down a bit before asking McCoy for advice.  
At least that was what he made himself believe.  
Deep down he already knew that there was no way he would enter the med bay in the condition he was in right now.  
He did not want to concern anybody with his worries when in reality it was probably nothing and gone in a few days anyway.  
He made sure he was the only person currently in the bathroom and then tried to take some deep breaths, which proved to be rather difficult.  
Splashing water in his face did seem to help though.  
However the weird thing was that once he convinced himself that maybe he would visit McCoy tomorrow, one day more or less with this condition wouldn't matter, the knot loosened a bit. 

He felt a bit better as he went back to his chambers to get changed and finally go to the bridge.  
He wasted enough time already today, hopefully, he would still be able to complete all his duties.  
If not he had to do extra work hours today, that are just the consequences that came with wasting time on stupid things like this.  
So he pushed it aside, letting it throb in the background and tried avoiding thinking about it at all costs.  
He could go a little while longer without telling anybody, it was not like it affected his abilities to be a captain he told himself and ignored it further. 

But every morning it seemed a bit more difficult to push it aside and get up like nothing had changed.  
It was becoming harder to forget.  
With everything he had to do it seemed like an easy task to just forget because the Enterprise and the well-being of this crew always came first for him anyway.  
However, every evening when he finally went to his private chambers the feeling pushed itself into the foreground and silenced all his other thoughts.  
It was buzzing through his head like a hurricane, mixing up everything it came in contact with, flying against the inside of his skull, letting his ears ring and making his heart flutter.  
But not in the good way, not the way his heart would flutter every time he was in love, no it was beating so fast he felt as though it wanted to escape his chest.  
It worried him sometimes but he continued ignoring it.  
After a long day as the captain, he was so drained that he just fell into bed right away, at least that was how it had always been.

Expecting nothing else he went to bed one night but he couldn´t find peace.  
Prior he had always been able to sleep right away, no wonder after the long workdays he had, but now, now he wasn´t even able to fall asleep peacefully.  
Although his days had not gotten more tiring it was taking him longer and longer to silence his thoughts at night.  
He woke up every night, plagued by tangled thoughts that were wandering through his head like a ghost and not allowing his a minute of a good nights sleep.  
He laid awake, changed his position every five minutes but his thoughts would not shut up.  
They replayed every little thing that had taken place that day. Every conversation he had and everytime someone looked at him in a slightly weird way. 

He was becoming paranoid that someone from the crew might have noticed that something was wrong with him.  
It was keeping him from sleeping that night and the night after that.  
At the third night, he feels asleep, not because his thoughts were finally quiet but because his body couldn't take the exhaustion anymore.  
And that was the way it had stayed since then.  
Every few nights he´d fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion and the other days he would work without having slept the night before at all.  
He tried to keep himself busy at night to shorten the time but nothing was able to keep his thoughts from spiralling into an endless void of questions and overanalysing everything.

He hoped nobody noticed that he was more tired than usual after those sleepless nights.  
He started to feel the consequences that came with the lack of sleep. Every day it was becoming more and more difficult to stay awake during the day and more and more difficult to fall asleep during the night.  
To the outside he did his best to hide his tiredness, he did not allow himself to show that he was weak.  
He was the captain, after all, it was his duty to always do his best, even though it has gotten harder and harder these days.

He hoped desperately that nobody noticed that his eyes were heavier than usual and he blinked more often than normal.  
One time Chekov had asked him why he kept spacing of while on duty on the bridge.  
He had just asked him if anything was wrong and if he needed a break but Jim took that as a sign that he needed to pay closer attention to hiding his fatigue from now on. 

Sometimes he slouched into his chair when he thought nobody was watching him right now and sometimes the opposite happened.  
He was not able to stay still while he sat on the bridge, that buzzing in his chest was just too unsettling.  
He just had to get up and wander the bridge a bit hoping that no one around him noticed his sweaty hands and quickened breath or how nervously he walked around just to keep himself busy and distracted from all the things he was feeling.

During the day he was not able to stay still while at night his body felt onerous.  
Of course, his thoughts were still racing a million miles an hour but his body had turned to stone.  
In those nights many memories made their way to the surface of this awareness again. From back in the days when he was at the academy and from times before he had any friends.  
Before he was able to call McCoy, Spock, Uhura, Chekov and Sulu his friends.

Back then, one time he had felt almost exactly like this, he remembered one night.  
In those days he had been homeless, just barely getting by. He took every little job he could get to earn some money.  
From that little amount of money, he stayed at one motel after the other never knowing where the next day would lead his way.  
Back then he had felt similar to this, only that it had felt heavier and calmer then whereas now he felt restless and tense.

Memories came up from the many nights he spent watching the sun rise and fall, back then he hadn´t been able to sleep either.  
He remembered, that one morning a sparrow had landed on his windowsill, right before sunrise.  
It had been fascinating Jim already but the Sparrows song was even more enchanting.  
A melancholic melody had been hanging in the air and had replaced everything Jim had been thinking at that very moment.  
Back then the melody had brought tears to his eyes and now as he laid in the dark reflecting on that moment it brought tears to his eyes again.

That was the reason he had set the song of a sparrow as his ringtone to wake him up in the morning. Ever since he started feeling the way he did now a lot had changed for him.  
Internally a lot had changed.  
He had to adjust himself to hiding his feelings more and not letting anything show on the outside.  
Jim knew that maybe it was not the right decision to keep this all from his friends, from his family, his crew.  
It was a dumb feeling, yes he was aware of that but he did not feel ready to tell anyone either. 

Not yet.  
He was still hoping that somehow all of this would just vanish.  
That he´ll just get over it eventually. So that was why he had set this song as his ringtone.  
He had not set it to indulge in old memories but rather to remind him every morning that he had once felt like this too and that the feeling had left him, just like it should pass this time.  
Hopefully.

"Speak Sparrow speak  
oh please, won't you try,  
tell me all the answers  
to this meaningless life."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for reading my story.  
> Hopefully, it was somewhat enjoyable. English is not my first language so I apologize for any errors in the text. It was my first attempt at writing fanfiction and it´s just meant to be a quick character study. Anyways, hope you all are having an extraordinary great day.
> 
>  
> 
> The song is Sparrow by Tom Odell. I recommend listening to the version from The Piano Tapes Album because that version inspired this fanfiction.


End file.
